Elizabeth D. Hermann is a professor of Landscape Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. She holds a PhD from Harvard University where her dissertation focused on urban change in Granada, Spain in the medieval Muslim period during the years of the Black Death. Elizabeth received a Masters in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University, and Bachelors degree in Biology from the University of Vermont. She was a Visiting Scholar in the Global Environments Program at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University in 2004, and the Aga Khan Visiting Associate Professor in Islamic Architecture in 1999, a junior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, and received the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture in 1986. In addition to her academic research, she has practiced with various firms including Sasaki Associates over the past 20 years.
Elizabeth teaches studios in landscape architecture and architecture, as well as thesis, history and urban planning seminars. Recent courses include “Mapping the Universe/Building a World: Islamic Science in the Medieval Period,” “Environment, Society and Culture,” “Architecture and Urbanism in the Pre-Modern Muslim World,” and “Urban Systems: Bridging the Divide (New Haven, CT).” Her past research has focused on issues of cross-cultural exchange between the western and Islamic worlds and the role of landscape and the city in the construction of cultural and national identities.
Her most recent research includes the planning and design for a new Asian University for Women to be built in Chittagong, Bangladesh. The conceptual master plan for the campus was developed with Professor Derek Bradford and students from RISD and MIT. In 2004 she coordinated a conference and exhibition on water issues in South Asia at Rhode Island School of Design. In the summer of 2005, through the international organization she co-founded and co-directs, “Urban Water, Wastelands, Society and Design Alliance (UW2SDa),” she co-coordinated a weeklong symposium and workshop on “Sustainable Solutions for Urban Wetlands” in Dhaka, Bangladesh which focused on water infrastructure in the capital city and how design could address issues of urban flooding, illegal encroachment, wastewater management and livelihood needs of the poor. A follow-up conference, workshop and exhibition will be held in the Boston area in January 2006.